


My Life As A Boruto Villain

by Abbie_Blizzard



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, Naruto
Genre: Angst and Feels, Child Murder, Childhood Trauma, Conditioning, Coping, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Family Drama, Family Dynamics, Family Feels, Gen, Medical Trauma, Murder, Ninja, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Reincarnation, Suicide, Training, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:00:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28205739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abbie_Blizzard/pseuds/Abbie_Blizzard
Summary: Being reborn into the Narutoverse sounds neat and it would be... if you weren't born during BORUTO'S ERA!!!Ugh.AND I'm a villain from an anime-only filler arc?Welp, this is gonna suck.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	1. The first 6 years

My first ever memory took place when I was nearly three years old. It was a Christmas morning and I was the first one out of my family to wake up and run into the lounge, ready to open presents. My mum, my dad, my little sister and I were all staying at my mum's parents house, along with my mum's older brother. At that point in my life, my little brother hadn't been conceived yet so our gathering was a little smaller than it would be in future.  
I remember waiting an extraordinarily long time for everybody to wake up and when they finally did, I was told by my parents that in order for me to open my presents I had to give-up my blanket. Blanky, as I so affectionately called it, was a light pink woollen blanket I'd been sleeping with since forever. It was my equivalent of a dummy or teddy bear to cuddle during nap-time.   
I knew the day was coming where I would have to part with blanky because I was going to preschool soon and blanky wouldn't be allowed to come.   
Naturally, three year old me thought our parting would happen when I was way, way older. So when I was given my ultimatum at Christmas that same year, to say my little heart was shocked would be an understatement.   
However, even then, the rational part of my brain knew that trading in my blanket for what then seemed like boat-loads of presents wasn't such a bad idea. After all, I was going to lose blanky someday anyway and this way I got something worthwhile out if it!  
I don't remember what happened after I ran out of the living room to give my beloved blanky back to my nanny or coming back out and opening my presents afterwards. But I do remember standing before my wrapped presents, blanky in my hands and the faces of my family staring back at me while three-year-old me made the fateful decision to give-up my sleeping companion for new toys.  
I would say my mind registers that as my first proper memory because it was probably the first time I used my developing rational skills and experienced conflicting emotions, mainly loss and grief verses joy and excitement, at the same time.  
As far as first memories go, it can't get any better than that I think.  
Well, not compared to the first memory of my second life anyway...  
I was two and half years in to my first reincarnation and thus, I was younger than my first self by a full year. This turned out to be perfectly normal in my new world and even if it wasn't, I at least was expected to have a more developed brain than other humans because I was a literal GENETICALLY ENGINEERED TEST TUBE BABY!!!  
How did I know this was the case the moment I opened my eyes?   
Well, the first thing I can accurately recall starts with me being carried out of a cylindric tank on a wave of mysterious green fluids and deposited onto a hard concrete floor. There were loud beeping noises going off all around me and hundreds of other identical green tanks filled with babies in various states of growth dominating my vision.  
This lead me to the logical conclusion that I too had been grown inside one of these tanks and was therefore apart of some kind of scientific experiment.   
To make matters even creepier; after I managed to wipe the lukewarm fluid from my eyes and sit up, I was faced with a dark, towering figure leering over my naked body like I was some kind of tasty morsel he couldn't wait to eat!  
This man, as I later found out, was one Tanuki Shigaraki and my new father.   
Traumatic much?   
I sure thought so because the next thing I remember doing was screaming my lungs out and being assaulted by waves of fear, panic, confusion, and cold.  
Sooo, yeah, not a great start to round two of the game of life.  
Thankfully, my next fully formed memory occurred almost immediately after and started with a soft, feminine voice cooing out, "Sumire." Followed by the feeling of two warm hands wrapping me in a very snuggly blanket smelling of lavender and cradling my body to their warm and comforting chest.   
This woman turned out to be Hakuna Shigaraki, my new mother and primary caregiver going forward.   
Why my new father had a name that reminded me of My Hero Academia's main villain, Tomura Shigaraki and my mother had the first part of the catchy jingle, "Hakuna Matata" as her first name??? I'll never know.  
Anyway, most of my memories after that are, quite naturally, fuzzy.  
They consist mainly of images of orange stone walls carved with endless swirls, fire torches hung on wall sconces, endlessly long corridors that caused footsteps to echo, Shigaraki's tall back and cold sneer, knives and swords and needles stabbing into my skin, hours upon hours spent crying in the Lab, and Hakuna's soft willowy voice singing me to sleep at night.  
There was only one thing that stood out in detailed clarity during those years; I could recall living another life as an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PERSON before this one!?!  
Not only did this mean I had definitive proof of the reincarnation cycle at my finger tips. But I had also died before I'd reached my thirtieth birthday in my first life!!  
I mean how unfair is that?!  
Of course, I'm pretty sure I'd managed to mess up the reincarnation process somehow because I'd thought that the whole point of reincarnation was to start a new life with a clean slate.   
Except I had started mine with ALL the memories of my FIRST one perfectly intact soooo...   
Oops? Yay? Bazinga?   
You would think that this glitch in the matrix would make my second life as Sumire Shigaraki even better, as I had two decades of life experience under my belt before I even began.  
And you would be right... if I'd been born in my first world a couple of years into the future.  
Unfortunately, this was not the case.  
You see, even with a two-year-old's brain, I recognized the name 'Sumire Shigaraki' as the name of a fictional character in an anime/manga series called 'Boruto'.   
Now this could have been a unique coincidence. But the character of Sumire also had a father called 'Tanuki Shigaraki' and a mother who looked identical to 'Hakuna Shigaraki' in her flashbacks.  
Fool me once; shame on you, fool me twice; shame on me, fool me thrice; and I've been reincarnated into the Naruto Universe!  
"Great!" you say, "I've always wanted to be a ninja and have chakra and go on adventures with Naruto, Sakura and Sasuke!"  
Well my friends, to that I say, "Yes, that would be cool."  
Yet, what your forgetting is, I was reborn as Sumire Shigaraki- a.k.a: A character born AFTER the events of the fourth shinobi world war. Making me alive during the events of Boruto.  
NOT Naruto, NOT Naruto Shippuden, but BORUTO!!!  
"..."  
Yeah, exactly.  
To make matters worse, Sumire was a VILLIAN in the anime's first story arc. Until Boruto Uzumaki pulled a Fairytale and Talk no Jutsued her to the good guys side.  
The fictional Sumire had been a one-note antagonist that posed little to no real threat to the protagonist due to her weak will and dumb reason for being a bad guy in the first place.  
Basically, her father had been one Tanuki Shigaraki, a ROOT Agent working for Danzo during Naruto and Naruto Shippuden. When Danzo was later killed by Sasuke Uchiha, Tsunade Senju ordered the ROOT Organization disbanded. From then on, anyone associated with Danzo or ROOT were ostracized, including Shigaraki and his young wife, Hakuna.  
After that, the Ex-Head Researcher swore vengeance on the Hidden Leaf, a.k.a Konoha/Konohagakure.  
He went about his revenge plot by creating the Gozu Tenno seal, brainwashing his daughter to use the other-worldly Biju, Nue to blow up The Leaf Village and then dying while surgically implanting the seal onto his daughter's back.   
Sumire, being the dutiful brainwashed daughter she was, then decided to go along with her father's doomed scheme because what else would she do?  
At twelve years old, she infiltrated the Leaf as a ninja academy Student, began stealing people's Chakra to feed Nue, made the mistake of becoming friends with the Protagonist, later got caught by ANBU, summoned a half-grown Nue in a botched attempt at escape and then got Talk no Jutsued into surrendering by the entitle brat that is Boruto.  
All in all, her reason for killing millions of people had boiled down to, "My Father told me so." and was therefore easily taken down via the magical power of friendship.  
If that didn't make her a terrible villain, then the fact she got of SCOT-FREE for her actions certainly did.   
(Or did that make her a great villain? Hmmm...)  
Like, COME ON!  
She attacked a city full of thousands of innocents with a knock-off tailed beast and got to re-join the Ninja Academy afterwards like nothing had happened!!!  
The character had shown so much promise too.  
If she was just a little bit smarter, she could have turned into a great foil for the heroes.  
Seriously, the girl had the skill level of a Chunin at twelve, had a giant Biju monster under her control, and she had access to it's OP ability of being able to drain ANY KIND OF CHAKRA her summon came into contact with!  
Plus, Nue resided in his OWN FRICKIN' DIMENSION that she alone had access too.  
If she had wanted, she could have literally teleported Nue in and out of his dimension wherever and whenever she wanted.   
Heck! she could have teleported herself anywhere via Nue's dimension like Obito's Kamui and she Never. Did.  
What did this mean for me?  
It meant that I was stuck having been reborn as Sumire Shigaraki and should prepare myself to suffer through her traumatic childhood, pronto.  
But that wasn't the only challenge I faced living life for a second time. Ah no, there were many, many more.  
Firstly, I had been reborn into the version on the Narutoverse where they spoke Japanese and as I ONLY spoke English, that meant I couldn't understand what anybody was saying or writing.  
Secondly, although my body had the development of a two and a half-year-old, it had spent those years floating in a strange tank. Meaning I was stuck using muscles that had never been used before. While also contending with the arduous process of developing hand-eye coordination, muscle memory and stamina from NOTHING!  
Thirdly: Chakra.  
Need I say anything else?  
Oh, and I don't even get me started on my new father!  
Judging by the fact my first memory in this world was of me being freed from a test tube in a room full of test tubes, Tanuki Shigaraki was going to be far more demented, sadistic and evil than Sumire's flashbacks hade ever implied.  
Mainly, I had a huge suspicion the anime had censored them to an absurd degree and Shigaraki was really Orochimaru levels of crazy.  
To prove this, the next three years of my life were spent exclusively inside one of Orochimaru's abandoned Konoha hideouts that had later been claimed for ROOT's exclusive use after he defected.  
Why it hadn't been found by ANBU and destroyed after Danzo's death?   
I didn't know.   
But Tanuki and Hakuna had clearly been living there for years and never been evicted or caught. Or else my second go around at being three, four and five wouldn't have been spent isolated underground.  
Now, I know you want to know what my daily routine during those years was like.   
So, here you go!  
(Though keep in mind this is only what I could manage to recall through the fuzziness of a brain still developing it's temporal lobe)  
In the mornings, I would wake up at seven am, run laps around the hideout till I threw-up, got showered by my mother in our shared bedroom's on suite, then dressed in ANBU's toddler sized uniform.  
"Why, an Anbu uniform?" you ask.  
Well, as neither I nor Hakuna Matata were allowed to leave the base, my mother dipped into the Hideout's clothing reserves and dressed me in a basic black shorts- black tee-shirt combo finished off with black shinobi sandals. The only accessory to the minimalist outfit was the single kunai holster secured to my right thigh with white wrappings.  
If it wasn't for my royal purple hair, iris's and pupils, there wouldn't have been any colour to give my outfit a sense of identity or individuality.  
Next, I ate breakfast laced with various poisons in the Lab under Shigaraki's supervision. Followed by the hours until lunch time learning how to write, read and speak Japanese. As well as basic maths, science, history, geography and chakra theory thrown in sporadically.  
From what I can recall, I actually quite liked my mornings- bar the run until I dropped part. I got to learn Japanese and study the world history of the five shinobi nations.   
Of course, a lot of it was filtered through the biased lens of the Land of Fire and The Hidden Leaf Village. But it was like going to school back in my first world: Informative and monotonous, if a little bit lonely.  
It was a relatively peaceful time, considering the circumstances.  
My afternoons were an entirely different story though...  
After another meal filled with more doses of poisons (So, I could build up an immunity, duh) Shigaraki would take me out of the Laboratory of Hell and into the Dodging Room of Doom.  
This room was similar to a Racquetball Court, 12 by 6 by 6 metres, except with canons loaded with a mix of kunai, shuriken and senbon imbedded in the walls at all angles, INCLUDING the floor.  
I had to stand on the painted red X in the middle of the court and told to, "Dodge or you'll die, Sumire!"   
I can distinctly remember there being an observation window high up on the back wall where my father would stand and work the control panel because I would always shout at it when I couldn't take it anymore.  
Not that Shigaraki listened.  
The sadist preferred to tinker with the different modes and settings and wouldn't let me stop unless I was in danger of bleeding out... Which was often.  
To his credit though, he started the little two and a half year old me of on Beginner: Mode 1.1.  
This level launched single projectiles, one at a time, from one cannons. Beginner: Mode 1.2 launched single projectiles, one at a time, from ALL cannons and Beginner: Mode 1.3 launched single projectiles, at the SAME TIME, from ALL cannons.  
By my third birthday, I had graduated to Beginner Mode 2 which was the same in principle as 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 except the cannons launched three projectiles instead of one.  
Modes 3, 4, and 5 only increased the number of projectiles too six, nine and twelve. But as they were set at the Beginner Level, the speed at which they were thrown was only a measly 50 KPH.   
(The average speed a grown male throws a cricket ball, btw)  
It was a bit like playing Dodgeball, except with knives!  
When three hours had passed, I moved on to the Target Hall.  
This room was like a full sized Basketball Court, 92 by 50 by 7 metres, and had red and white targets the size of a frisbee stuck on every inch of the walls.   
The neat thing about the floor of the GYM was that it had all sorts of storage seals painted onto it. You could summon: logs, fences, boulders and trees with targets on them to stand on and/or aim at out of thin air!  
Shigaraki often went around the hall summoning obstacles for me to use and then unsummoned then when we were finished.  
How the real life trees, wooden posts and rocks never rotted or decayed was thanks to some special Uzumaki Fuinjutsu I still can't pronounce the name of.  
That was one of the benefits of living in an abandoned ROOT Hideout, I guess.  
They had excellent training facilities.  
After three hours of target practice, I was hauled off to the Sick Bay- a sectioned off corner of the main lab filled with medical equipment and supplies.   
There was a nice white bed I could lie on while my father used a combo of medical ninjutsu and special ointments to heal what ever wounds I'd gotten that day.  
The most common kind of injuries I racked up were pulled muscles, sprained joints, pressure bruises and tension headaches.  
Big, black regular bruises were constantly littering my arms and legs. Thus, they weren't worth wasting healing chakra on.   
I usually just rubbed in some healing ointment, wrapped them up in sport's tape and hoped I didn't get hit in the same spot the next day.  
Though, nine times out of ten, I would get hit there again anyway.  
Once I was relatively patched up, we proceeded to the hands down, WORST part of my day.   
Shigaraki liked to haul my bruised, sweaty form over to the Lab's examination table and force me through a serious of scans, bloods, and stretches before I was given a mysterious "booster shot".  
A well known fact about my first self was I hated needles with a vengeance!!!  
Sadly for me, my fear of the sharp point things carried over to my second life, so you can imagine how sick I felt every time Shiga stuck needle, after horrifyingly long needle under my skin.  
It certainly didn't help that whatever the shimmery white substance that was my "booster shot" was made of spread through my veins like liquid fire!!!  
By the time my mother showed up to escort me back to our room, I had lost my ability to walk and had to be carried to bed, screaming and crying, bridal-style.  
At some point (I can't recall when exactly), the evil bastard   
shortened my dodging and throwing training to two hours each and added in Taijutsu and chakra control practice to be completed before Sick Bay Time.  
For Taijutsu, we used The Stadium- A literal underground stadium with enough seats to hold four hundred spectators.   
The actual arena was about the size of a tennis court, except the floor was made of softly packed dirt and a small mote ran around the edges, about three metres deep.  
Later, I wondered what the room could have been used for back when Danzo or Orochimaru inhabited it?  
Surely they hadn't held fighting tournaments for their followers/prisoners... Right? RIGHT!?  
I'm getting off track.  
Shigaraki would run my little body through kata after kata in The Stadium until they surpassed the point of being imbedded in my muscle memory and turned into natural instinct. Then, when it looked like I was going to pass-out from physical fatigue, we marched to The Snake Temple and began chakra control exercises.  
By the way, it wasn't actually called 'The Snake Temple'.   
But it was a pentagonal prism located at the centre of the base and had five giant stone snake statues sitting in all five corners.   
So, yes, a toddler me dubbed it 'The Snake Temple' because what else could it really be?  
A small fire pit sat at the base of each statue and when I sat in the middle of the room, legs crossed and hands resting on my knees, the snakes' eyes all stared at me in silent disapproval.  
It was the creepiest room in the base, in my opinion.  
Clearly, Orochimaru had built it as some kind of shrine or meeting place for his snake summons way back when. The prism was definitely large enough to house Manda, Orochimaru's snake summon or Aoda, Sasuke's snake summon with room to wiggle.  
The first chakra control exercise Daddy-O taught a... three year old? Four year old?... me was the 'Stick A Leaf To Your Forehead' exercise.  
Now, you would think this would be pretty chill next to all the physical torture I got put through but nay, you would be wrong.  
See, chakra as a concept is very cool.   
It's basically ninja magic!  
You just do the fancy hand seals, squeeze your butt cheeks or something and then BAM! Super cool jutsu!!!  
But what your forgetting is, chakra is also a foreign parasite in the form of mystical energy that has forcibly attached itself to the human biology, altering our very DNA.   
For me, learning how to harness this energy that flowed through my new body like blood via a completely separate network of veins and arteries I had never had before was H.A.R.D.  
The first time Tanuki put me through the leaf control exercise and told me to, "Focus your chakra to your forehead, Sumire."   
I spent a good hour sitting in a meditative pose tensing every muscle in my body in an attempt to get the leaf to stick to my forehead to no avail.  
Eventually, I just confessed I had no idea what the heck he was talking about and cursed the anime for making it look so easy.  
Shigaraki took my omission with about as much grace as one might expect from a herd of elephants being exposed to a mouse.  
That is to say, he beat me to an inch of my life and then introduced my battered self to The Isolation Cell.  
This room was essentially the ninja equivalent of a sensory deprivation cell, where the only thing one could sense was one's own thoughts and the beating of one's heart.   
I later learnt this was achieved using special seals that were placed on the walls, ceiling and floor, preventing anyone from seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, or even tasting A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G. While inside...  
And it was down right terrifying!!!  
I don't know how long I was in there the first time, it could have been days, it could have been minutes. But what I do know is, by the time my eyes saw light again I had discovered that my chakra felt like a second set of veins running through my body. If I shut my eyes and focused in on the foreign sensation, I could sense it softly buzzing next to my pulse points.   
The next time I was put through the leaf control exercise, I had to mediate for about two and half hours before I could sense my chakra again and then will it to slowly pool in my forehead.   
I'm not gonna lie, it took about a solid year of repeating this exercise everyday for three hours at least before I finally got that damn leaf to stick!   
Even then, that was only accomplished with the help of spending a good couple of nights huddled up in the sensory deprivation room, meditating like a monk aiming to mummify himself.  
Basically, chakra may look cool on screen but it seriously sucks in real life, okay? Okay.  
Moving on!  
Naturally, once I passed that mile stone, good ole dad gave me a pat on the back and mum baked me a celebratory cake and we all laughed and cheered over my success- HA. HA. HA... No.   
Not even close.  
Shigaraki told toddler me that he expected his daughter to be able to hold that leaf in place all day or so help him, weeks spent in the Isolation Cell with nothing but an IV Bag hooked into my arm would be the least of my problems.  
(For the record, he never actually put me through that. But it was scary to know that the punishment was on the table regardless)  
So, yeah.   
For three years, that was my life.  
By the time I turned six-years-old for the second time, I could throw 8 kunai simultaneously and have them hit their stationary targets, had mastered Beginner: Modes 1, 2 and 3 in the Dodging Room of Doom, run 42km in 3.5hrs, do Basic Taijutsu Katas in my sleep, and I could hold that stupid leaf to my forehead for a solid twenty-four-hours before passing out from mental fatigue.   
Yeah, that's right! I was a little bit of a ninja prodigy!!  
On the academic side of things, I was basically fluent in Japanese, though my chit chat skills needed some more work as the only people I got to talk too were Hakuna Matata and The Villain.   
AND I had sat the Academy's written entrance test exam and passed with Excellence.   
Faulty reincarnation cycle for the win, baby!!!  
Pretty good stats for a newly turned six-year-old, right?  
Hakuna Matata certainly thought so.   
She taught my Sumire self to plait my mid-back length hair as a, "Congrats! You haven't gone insane!" present.  
I wasn't allowed material gifts as that could lead to an "unhealthy attachment" and, "No true shinobi owns objects of sentimental value, Sumire. Do not ask me again!"  
For my tormentor/captors part, he marked the passing of my sixth year by stopping training in the basics of ninjaing and started my 'proper shinobi' training in earnest.  
At that point, my new brain was FINALLY able to form consecutive memories and I began to properly experience everything that happened to me like I could in my first life.  
This development was... An unwelcome one, to be honest.  
Don't get me wrong though!   
I LOVED being able to think and feel like a normal person again. But it came at the cost of discovering I had gone through major trauma and developed a serious panic disorder in its wake.  
For example: After my sixth birthday, any mention of the "Booster Shot" caused my heart rate to spike, my purple pupils to dilate, a cold sweat to form on my skin and my hands and knees to tremble.  
Thankfully, I knew the signs of an impending panic attack and re-taught myself to breathe my way out of one.  
And that was only one of the nicer cooping strategies I'd formed.  
Sometimes, I'd find my baby teeth gnawing my finger nails to stumps unconsciously or wake up in the middle of the night to find I'd wet myself during a forgotten nightmare.  
It was both distressing and difficult to manage on top of an increasingly intense and abusive training regime.  
But worst of all, was finding out Shigaraki had managed to desensitize my new self to the idea of murder, stealing, lying and rape!  
To him, a good shinobi had to be a ruthless assassin, a skilled liar, a guiltless pick-pocket and an excellent seducer, willing to do what ever it took to complete a mission successfully. Any hesitation on my part was cause for concern and some new part of me accepted that wholeheartedly.  
This new mentality was beyond scary and for a long time, I tried to fight it. I tried to call on my moral compass to provide me with a guilty conscience, to keep me grounded in my old world's values.  
Yet with every training session I was pushed past to my limits, every night spent crying and beating myself up internally, it became harder and harder to resist his brainwashing.  
It didn't help that my relationship with my father could be boiled down to: I did everything he told me to, no questions asked.  
In the beginning stages of getting my full memory back, I'd tried to rebel against his orders. Sometimes by refusing to do them to his face, other times by saying I would do it then walking away.  
Out right aggressive acts quickly became unsustainable though...  
Mainly due to Shiga's tendency to dislocate either, my shoulders or hips and NOT healing them afterwards.  
Next, I tried rebelling using passive-aggressive tactics.  
Such as: Badgering him with ,"Why?" and, "Can you explain please?" after each order. Or by employing strategic incompetence in my studies. This also became unsustainable when the psychopath switched his tactics to thwart mine by slapping me in the face so hard he left bruises and never answering my questions.  
Luckily for me, my first self had been fascinated with human psychology and had studied it in my free time religiously. Thanks to my dedication and slightly unusual hobby, I was able to recognise Tanuki's attempts to discourage my developing brain from thinking independently and knew ways to protect myself.  
I was still angry that the ex-ROOT member was subjecting his own daughter to the organisation's emotional conditioning programme though!!  
It was not surprising, considering he worshipped the ground Danzo walked on and was a psychopath himself, but it was disturbing and abusive none the less.  
Once I recognised the signs, I stopped outwardly rebelling altogether and switched to doing so internally. Usually this took the form of coming up with my own reasons for why Shigaraki was giving me orders and then brainstorming ideas on how this was contributing to my training overall.  
Doing so made it a little less begrudging when I went through with his order regardless. But I kept it up because it flexed my independent thinking skills, eased my conscience, and helped me convince myself that I was doing what he said for my own reasons.  
Whether this was an effective strategy is up for debate. I wouldn't know if I had been successful or not until he died and I got to runaway to Boruto's Konoha.  
Anyway, with Shigaraki deeming me ready for "Proper" shinobi training and my subsequent awakening, a new daily routine was established.  
My "New and Improved" morning routine started at six am with my usual run.   
Except the length was doubled to 42km and I had to add weights to my arms and legs to increase my physical strength and endurance.  
I came to dread this one event so much, my mother would have to hold my purple hair back while I dry-heaved into the toilet, walk me through breathing exercises, and rub my back in soothing circles until I was composed enough to start.  
A shower in the communal bathroom followed my marathon's completion and I got to dress myself in my own room down the hall from Hakuna's.  
"Why had I been moved out of her room?" you ask.  
Well, I might have been a traumatised six-year-old, but I was a shinobi traumatised six-year-old. Thus, it was no longer acceptable for me to rely on my mother and we were separated at every possible opportunity.  
A small boon of this development came in the form of me being allowed to choose my own clothes for the day. One trip to the ANBU clothing cupboards and I had a new outfit all picked out.  
I settled for dressing myself in their shin-length black pants-secured to my ankles with white wrappings, a black high-collared singlet, black fingerless gloves that stopped midway up my upper arm, and black shinobi sandals. I liked to add wrappings around my wrist's over my gloves to ensure they were always supported and added another weapons holster to the small of my back.  
Again, the outfit held no sense of personality, but I made sure to grow out my silky purple hair to compensate.  
After eating a ridiculously lethal breakfast with Shigaraki in the lab, a six-year-old me had advanced chakra control training in the Snake Temple.  
By then, I had upgraded from learning to keep a leaf stuck to my head too learning to pool my chakra into my feet and vibrate it at a certain speed so I could stick to any surface.  
E.g. A wall, a tree or a lake.  
Surprisingly enough, I actually got water-walking down BEFORE wall and tree climbing. Vibrating my chakra in time to the ever-changing rhythm of the water felt like switching between dancing styles every other minute or so.   
It was fun and I had a blast sprinting across The Stadium's in-door river during Taijutsu warm-ups, just because!  
Unfortunately, my quick taking to water walking did not translate to tree walking and wall walking.   
But there was no need to despair as Tanuki Kabuki had a new and improved punishment all set and ready to go when I failed.  
He called it, "Resilience Training," while I dubbed it ,"Torture Time."  
Torture Time always took place at the end of the day so it wouldn't interfere with my more physically intensive training and always started with Shigaraki dragging me, sometimes kicking and screaming if I was feeling rebellious, to the Laboratory.   
Once inside, he forced me to strip off my clothes (Bar my underwear, because he had standards) and would strap my nearly-naked body onto the examination table so I couldn't wriggle away from all his torture devices.  
Surprisingly, the aim of the game wasn't to scare me into insanity or push my psyche into a vegetative state. But to raise my tolerance to pain, exclusively.   
It was during these lovely sessions that I realised when I channelled chakra around my brain, my pain receptors were dulled.   
This meant stab wounds, peeled off skin, pulled off nails and/or incisions into major organs hurt about as much as a paper cut.   
It still hurt.  
But it was nothing compared to what it should be.  
When Shigaraki realised what I was doing, he moved away from causing havoc in my pain receptors too causing havoc in my instincts to breath... Mainly by subjecting me to water boarding.   
Again though, thanks to my rigid chakra control exercises, I only experienced pseudo-drowning TWICE before I tried channelling chakra into my lungs and discovered I could hold my breath for twenty-five minutes.  
Cool, right?   
Yes, yes it was.  
If I ever got trapped in a Water Prison Jutsu, I was set!  
When Shiga got on to that trick as well, he began sealing away the majority of my chakra so only the bare minimum needed to live remained.  
Then, he pulled out the chakra scalpel.  
I'm not going to spell it out for you because my reactions were embarrassing and deeply humiliating. But lets just say that when a chakra scalpel is inserted into your chakra network at the incorrect frequency and you're told to, "Breath through the pain, Sumire." Peeing your pants is the least you can expect to happen...  
If I'm being real here, I don't think the human body was supposed to withstand the kind of treatment I was going through. Any normal person from my first world would have died, caught Chronic Fatigue or gone insane by now.  
But that was the blessing and curse of chakra- It made the body more durable.  
So, my "resilience training" with my father continued and I learned to tolerate the pain with gritted teeth and clenched fists. On the plus side, I learnt my pain threshold was through the roof!  
Haha, who know?  
MOVING ON!  
Torture Time finished with a couple minutes in the Sick Bay getting all my wounds healed. Until there was nothing left to blemish my milky white skin. Afterwards, I had a shortened "check-up" that recorded my growth and improvement and ended with the sting of my daily "Booster Shot".  
My new bedtime moved up to 11pm and I was often out like a light as soon as my head hit the pillow. I still got the occasional nightmare or woke up covered in a cold sweat. But I'd stopped peeing the bed and screaming in my sleep soooo... I took that as a win.  
My "New and Improved" afternoon routine started after I'd eaten lunch in the lab (again, all poisoned to build up resistance, even though I'm pretty sure that's not how its supposed to work?), before moving on to two hours of advanced dodging in the Training Room of Doom.  
All this resulted to graduating up to Beginner: Modes 4 and 5, where the number of projectiles launched at the same time upped to nine and twelve per cannon.  
The next task in my schedule was two hours of advanced target practice in the Target Hall. All that really changed here was I went from stationary targets directly infront of me too stationary targets besides or behind me. This forced me to learn how to throw shuriken in a curve and how to bounce one off of the other to change direction mid-air.  
After that, I got to start a new class!!!  
Shigaraki called it 'Acrobatics' while I called it 'Ninja Gymnastics!'  
The lessons were held in The Stadium again where I was re-taught the basic Handstand-Dive Roll-Cartwheel combo.  
In my first life I had taken a short Trampolining Course in Primary School and had been a member of a competitive Cheerleading Club for two years from sixteen too seventeen. So I already knew how to do a front flip, a front handspring, and a forwards and backwards walk-over.  
In this life, I got to go a step further and learnt how to do Aerials: No-Handed Cartwheels, Side Flips, Butterfly Twists (shortened to B-Twist) and backflips!  
With the handy dandy assistance of chakra flowing through my body, I was able to do backwards handsprings too.  
Sometimes, I would vault around the floor in wide circles just for heck of it.  
Flipping and twisting through the air felt like dancing to me. All the moves had a smooth rhythm to them and when done right, felt effortless.   
I LOVED IT!!!  
I can still remember how amazing and excited I'd been when I mastered the Round Off-Double Back Handspring-Backflip Combo.  
I'd seen the move performed by a Tumbler in my Cheer Club back in my first life and had always dreamed of trying it myself. I knew the combo wasn't used in combat in the Narutoverse and thus, it wasn't necessary to learn.   
But with the means and cabalitly to do the moves separately, why wouldn't I try combing them?   
Obviously the stupid Tanuki hadn't been impressed by the combo. But Hakuna Matata sure was and had "Ooo,"ed and "Ahhh,"ed for me when I showed her one weekend.  
Every second day, Ninja Gymnastics was switched out with advanced Taijutsu training filled with increasingly complicated katas and real-life sparring practice with daddy dearest.  
As he was a Jonin and I a lowly nothing, he totally took advantage of the opportunity to let of some steam and violently beat his only child to a pulp.  
Pulled muscles and sprained joints turned into broken bones, shin-splints and snapped tendons in a flash.  
"Sparring" lasted from anywhere between ten minutes to three hours depending on how severe the butt-kicking was dished out that day and I spent my last few hours before dinner and Torture Time, taking Survival Classes, a.k.a. bonding with mummy.  
Turns out, the whole time I'd been stuck inside the Hideout training to become a child soldier, Hakuna Matata had been allowed to GO OUTSIDE!?!  
I discovered this was because she was in charge of collecting and preparing all our meals inside the base. Every afternoon, she would forage the local forest for food, hunt and kill wild animals and go fishing at the nearby private beach.  
That was the secret behind her tanned olive skin, I realised!   
Compared to my pasty white ass, she got regular exposure to the sun while I had never stepped foot outside since I was born.  
I was SOOOOOO JEALOUS when I found out, I'd thrown a massive fit by smashing all the tanks in the room I was "birthed" in and letting all left the other test tube babies die.   
This unjustified murder of the innocent was totally not cool, as they were helpless and defenceless foetuses.   
But all that time spent eating in the lab hadn't been for nothing!  
You see, while Shigaraki had been fiddling with the Gozu Tenno, I had snooped through his files and learnt exactly what kind of human experimentation project my father was running.  
It turns out that The Villain had harvested my mother's eggs, artificially inseminated them using his own sperm and injected them all with Kaguya Otsutsuki cells obtained during the fourth shinobi world war. (How? Who knows! It's a Plot Hole!)  
Then, as if that wasn't a huge enough human right's violation already, he had used Orochimaru's weird tanks as artificial wombs to monitor the growth of each of his children.   
Just like with the Snake Sanin's experiments with Hashirama Cells, the majority of the eggs failed to accept the Rabbit Goddesses DNA into their own and died.   
The reason I had been kept in the tank until I was two and a half-years-old was because five of the ten babies who had accepted Kaguya's cells, were removed from their tanks at the typical nine months and perished.   
Tanuki Shigaraki had reasoned that their altered bodies needed more time to acclimate and so kept the last three in their tanks for another year. When he removed one at one years old and they died too, he waited another year and then picked me as tribute.  
Thus, Sumire Shigaraki was born and the last surviving baby was put into stasis.  
While raising/training me, the evil jerk decided he need more than one back up just-in-case my body couldn't handle the Gozu Tenno and REPEATED his experiment, again on his own children!!!  
So, when I stormed into that room full of my partly grown brothers and sisters, I made the executive decision to end their lives before they could be used by our terrible father for his experiment and mercy killed them.  
Does that make the new me a terrible person?  
On the one hand: Yeah, it absolutely does.   
I planned and executed the murder of my very own siblings, practically in cold blood!  
But on the other hand: There lives, if they survived the genetic implantation process, would have been like mine and no kid deserved to go through what I had.  
I know for a fact that if I hadn't had the memories and experience of my first self, I NEVER would have survived till now as un-brainwashed as I was. Let alone had the courage and fortitude to stay sane.   
So, yes.   
I killed my brothers and sisters while they were technically still in the womb. But I did it because even if they had survived, they would only been used as exposable test subjects by Shigaraki and that's not a life anyone should have to live.  
The moral quandary wasn't the worst part though.  
No, the truly disgusting thing that resulted from my first kills was the punishment... Or rather, the lack of one.  
Instead of Shigaraki subjecting me too forty-eight hours in the Isolation Cell and one double session with the nerve amplifier seal, he congratulated me!?  
There was no violence or verbal abuse, just a content smile and a few words of congratulations.  
"Good job," Shigaraki said, "You have made me proud," he said.  
That, above all else, was the most horrifying consequence of my actions...   
At The Villain's words, I suddenly realised that he had been working me up to this the entire time.  
Everytime he'd said, "You are always expendable," or, "Do not disappointment me, girl, " and, "You are useless if you're weak." was his way of subtly reinforcing the idea that I could be replaced by one my siblings in the tanks.   
The actual thought had never crossed my mind, but my subconscious brain had registered the threat. Thus, he had planted the idea in my head that the only way to ensure my long-term survival was if I was the only child left.  
Out of nowhere, I realised that the series of events that led to my discovery of Hakuna's ability to leave the base was manufactured by Shigaraki. He had, no doubt, been looking for the right motivation to push me to commit fratricide and taken my thirst for knowledge of the Five Elemental Nations as proof of my desire to leave the base.   
And the sad part was, he had been right.  
All it had taken was a supposed "miscalculation" in my training schedule for me to stumble upon my mother returning to the base, fruits in her hands and my jealousy had spiked!   
I had immediately acted on my desire to go outside by gaining the only leverage I thought I could over my father. I'd thought I was being clever by making myself his only living test subject because then I had something to trade for pieces of my freedom.   
When in reality, my thinking, my actions, my discoveries, it was all an elaborate plan to help me succeed in my first kill...  
And I HATED myself for falling for his trap!  
It was all so obvious in hindsight.  
But in the moment, it had felt so REAL, so SMART, so RIGHT!  
So, instead of feeling proud or a sense of accomplishment when Shigaraki gave me permission to join Hakuna Matata on hunting trips, I felt physically sick to my stomach!!!  
Yet at the end of the day, there was nothing I could do.  
To refuse his offer would be to lose what might be my only chance to leave the base. But to accept was to live with the guilt and knowledge that I was his puppet.  
It was a loose-loose situation and in the end, I took the privilege of being allowed to exit the base for one hour, every day, to learn how to hunt and forage with my mother.  
… it was my only way of escape and I took it, wounded pride aside.  
On that note, I would say my "New and Improved" routine wasn't that bad. It was hard and my panic attacks sucked and my nightmares got worse and sometimes the comfort and positive words Hakuna Matata gave me were the only things keeping me going, but... I could walk up walls like a ninja now!  
That is every narutards dream come true, isn't it?  
What more could a girl ask for in a second life?!  
Apparently not a normal, healthy childhood with two loving and sane parents.   
Nah, what I really needed to sell Sumire's tragic backstory was to have a parental death before the age of ten.  
After all, what kind of self-respecting villain DOESN'T have the depressing and traumatic death of a mother figure in their childhood?  
And thus, on the eve of my seventh year as Sumire Shigaraki, I walked into my second mother's bedroom to find her body lying crumpled on the floor, dead.


	2. My 7th year

Now I'm going to warn you, from here on out my story gets a lot more depressing and a little less light-hearted.  
There.   
That's all the warning your going to get.   
So don't be surprised if I suddenly start going all introspective and angsty and shit because there is a high chance I will, okay? Okay.  
MOVING ON!  
In my first life, I never experienced any loss of a loved one. I mean, yes, I'd had a couple of pet cats die and had been around eight and ten respectively when my Great Grandparents passed away.   
But I had never lost someone truly close to me.   
After all, I was only twenty-one-years old when I died. My mum, my dad, my little sister, my little brother and my Nanny and Grandad were all alive and well. So, I hadn't dealt with grief on such a huge scale before.  
The idea that one day my mum and dad were going to die and leave me behind was a very distant and far off event I didn't have to worry about.   
But with Sumire's life, I knew for a fact that my not-so-loving- father was going to die when he transplanted the Gozu Tenno onto my back and even then, that event happened when I turned eleven again.   
I still had another five years to get through before Shigaraki kicked the bucket; practically eons in kid time!  
But losing my mother?  
To suicide??  
On my seventh birthday???  
I simply never saw it coming... I should have, but I didn't... The fictional Sumire had even said that her mother died when she was young due to stress... But I hadn't thought she would be this young...   
How could I have noticed my new mother's mental health declining when I was too busy trying to survive brutal training, psychological conditioning and literal torture as a toddler?!  
The sad truth is; if I hadn't been so focused on relying on Hakuna to support me emotionally and physically, I would have been able to use my adult brain to see the signs of her suicidal ideation.   
Could I have prevented her death then?  
Probably. Mabey. Likely.  
But I hadn't and now my mother was dead and I was alone and it could all have been prevented if I'd pulled my head out of my own ass for just a second and TALKED TO HER! SAVED HER!! DONE ANYTHING OTHER THAN NOT NOTICE!!!  
The old me had been a dutiful daughter...   
While the new me was a down right terrible one and I deserved every second strapped to Shigaraki's lab bench having my nerves fried and my skin burned and my chakra drained.  
No, the new seven year old me deserved worse than that!  
I had KILLED my own MOTHER! I had KILLED my own SIBLINGS!  
The second version of me was a kinslayer and I had brought all this suffering onto myself because of it!!!  
Now my second mummy was gone forever...   
I would never get to spend another second with the woman who cut my hair, who chose my clothes, who taught me to read Hiragana and Katakana, who showed me how to write Kanji, who was there to sing me to sleep at night and comfort me from my nightmares, who taught me how to kill wild rabbits, boars and birds, who took the time to walk me through the forest and point out every edible and poisonous flora and fauna until I knew them by heart.  
I would never again get to sneak into her bed, snuggle into her side and feel safe and comforted in her embrace... I would never again lay eyes on her long violet hair or get to feel slightly uncomfortable staring into her purple irises and purple pupils...   
I'll soon forget what she smelled liked, what her smile looked like, what her voice sounded like. Soon, it would all fade away like my memories of my first family did.  
She wasn't like my first mum, but she was still the best mother I could have asked for and now I'll have to live with never getting to say goodbye to her either...  
Perhaps I am cursed to never give a final farewell to my loved ones in any life I live. That would be a fitting punishment for my past and current sins, I think.  
ANYWAY!  
To say I had a breakdown over my mother's corpse would be like saying a red hot chili pepper is only a little bit spicy.  
In other words, that was a gross understatement.  
All the walls I'd put up to guard my heart in order to survive in this world came crashing down in that moment. The grief from loosing my old life, the homesickness from missing my family and old world, the shock of discovering I'd been reincarnated, the fear at learning I was Sumire Shigaraki, and the struggle and frustration that came with learning an entirely new language all hit me at once.   
I could no longer hold back the sheer terror I'd felt at being trapped inside the Isolation Cell for the first time. Nor the reoccurring panic that came with being shoved inside it again and again with no way out. I remembered how truly confused and betrayed and helpless I'd been when Shigaraki violently broke my ribs, punctured my lung, fractured my thigh bones and dislocated my right shoulder that day I couldn't sense my chakra.  
Every time I'd been forced to eat poisoned food or starve, been forced to run until I vomited or had liquid fire pushed into my veins, every training session where I'd been forced to continue throwing shuriken with torn muscles or loose my right to sleep in the same room as my mother, ALL that built up anger, hatred, fear, despair, loneliness- IT WAS OVERWHLEMING!!!  
it didn't matter that Shigaraki used medical ninjutsu to heal me after he hurt me, that only allowed him get away with it!   
In my first life, I had never been pushed to keep fighting with a concussion, had never been strapped to a metal table and watched my own father slice open my stomach and I had never lost the right own my own body.  
In this second life, everything that I am was Shigaraki's.   
I lived everyday knowing that he let me live, that he let me eat, that he let me sleep, that he let me cry in my mummy's arms.   
He was my creator, he owned all that I was and besides; I had no where else to go.  
Leaving was never an option.  
Hakuna Matata was as much a prisoner as I was.   
If I left, then one of my unfortunate siblings would have just taken my place and the cycle would've continued with them.  
I was living in a toxic environment; isolated, scared and vulnerable.  
My mind had been twisted until I had convinced myself to murder my own blood and felt next to no guilt after doing so.   
The only other person I could rely on was powerless to stop her husband or save her daughter and the madness had driven her to suicide!!!  
It. Was. All. Too. Much.  
So when Shigaraki inevitably found me curled up on the floor, clutching the hand of my mother's corpse and crying hysterically... He knocked me out cold.  
The bastard then told me I was close to catatonic for six days. That he alone had cremated his wife's body and scattered her ashes into the sea and that I should be grateful I didn't have to do it.   
Was I angry he'd held my own mother's funeral without me?  
Was I pissed at him for forcing me into this life against my will?  
Did that little seed of resentment and bitterness take root in my heart and begin to poison my mind?  
No, to all of the above.  
Unsurprisingly, I had gone numb in the wake of my information overload and could scarcely feel the need to eat let alone have the ability to process my emotions without puking murderous intent at the world.  
So, by orders of my captor, I personally sealed Hakuna Shigaraki's bedroom shut. Thereby trapping the last worldly remnants of her life inside, along with the memories we made shared in their forever.   
The very next day, I moved my own bedroom out of the Northern wing and into the eastern wing, closer to the Temple, and never stepped foot in that part of the building again.  
Life after my mother's death was different, to say the least.  
Not only did my training schedule become more gruelling and chakra focused, but day-to-day chores that had once been performed by Hakuna were now my responsibility.  
For example; after every session in the Dodging Room of Doom, it was now my job to sharpen and oil the weapons before resetting them back into the cannons.   
The collection and maintenance of weapons in the Target Hall fell to me, along with all the laundry, food collection and cooking.   
On top of that, I was expected to sweep the halls, dust the snake statues, clean the bathroom and toilets, replace the torches on the wall sconces, AND continue my training.  
It was a lot.  
But my body moved on auto-pilot and life continued.  
My morning routine started at five am, where I had to run 40km under two hours with 100kg weights strapped to my arms, legs and torso.   
(Failure to do so added ten minutes to Torture Time)  
A quick shower later and I was eating breakfast in the lab again. My food stopped getting poisoned by that point and got injected directly into my blood stream instead. Apparently, there are only so many poisons that can be ingested in the Narutoverse. Whereas the amount of poisons that could be absorbed by the skin and sent straight to the blood stream were endless.  
After breakfast, I had Ninjutsu Training in The Stadium.  
It was in this class I finally started learning the E-Rank Jutsu taught at the Ninja Academy!  
I started with the Substitution Jutsu or the 'Body Replacement Technique'.  
You can only image how awfully it went...  
By then, I knew I wasn't a natural at anything to do with chakra. The mystical energy was just too foreign and invasive in my eyes. Thus, it took a lot of mental gymnastics to even be able to concentrate it in different areas of my body.   
So obviously, when I stood in the middle of the arena with a crudely cut log placed five metres infront of me and was told to, "Latch your chakra onto the log and switch," while forming the hand seals: Tiger-Boar-Ox-Dog-Snake!  
Nothing happened.  
Daddy-D, excepting my antics by now, just rolled his eyes and told me I couldn't leave the Base until I had this "basic technique" mastered. With that helpful motivation to guide me, it took about five weeks for my brain to figure out that Step One of the Substitution Jutsu was to push your chakra outside of your body to create a sensory field.   
The average sensory field spanned ten yards in diameter and required the bare minimum of chakra to be stretched out of the body.  
Easy, right?   
WRONG!  
This skill alone required me to evenly push my already finicky chakra out of every tenketsu gate in my body At. The. Same. Time.   
A task that required three evenings meditating in the Isolation Cell before I learnt to stretch my chakra out of my body instead of simply expelling it into the air.  
To make matters harder; when I finally did manage to make a sensory field, it turned out less like a perfect sphere and more like a two-year-old's mud ball that spanned THIRTY YARDS IN DIAMETRE at it's smallest.   
This development assaulted my brain with waaay to much sensory input and to add to that headache, I couldn't even interpret what exactly I was sensing!?!  
It took my seven-year-old going on twenty-one-year-old self a full month of studying and categorising everything my chakra came into contact with before I figured out I could only sense objects with water inside them.  
For example: The log's interior was peppered with water droplets, the air felt like it was full of a heavy mist and I could sense the water in the Hideout's pipes thrumming several metres bellow my feet. I could even sense the minute amounts of water inside a human body! Though I didn't dare try merging my chakra with that, lest I accidentally kill the recipient.  
As for everything else? It was all just empty space.  
I figured the reason I had this weird sensory ability was because of my chakra's nature affinity to Water. I hypothesized my chakra was just naturally in-tune with the element and was drawn to any source of it when outside my body.  
Was this normal or a rare kekkei genkai? Again, I didn't know.  
Regardless, the trick was gonna be great when I got round to nature transformation Jutsu. But right then, it was a total hinderance.   
Eventually, I settled for just using my sensory field to locate objects with water inside them and latching on to those instead.  
Step Two of the Substitution Jutsu required me to "lock on" to my chosen swappable object.   
And again! This was much harder than it had any right to be.  
Turns out that to "lock on" to a target, one has to MERGE THEIR CHAKRA with the object's chakra (never mind the fact inanimate objects technically don't have their own chakra!?!)  
So yeah.  
I had been stuck inside the Hideout for a month and a half by that point and I was willing to screw the 'proper way' to do the damn jutsu and just improvise.  
And I did.  
I figured that if I couldn't merge my chakra with an object that I couldn't sense anyway, I would merge it with the water element INSIDE the object instead.   
One would think that by doing this I would yank out the water within the object instead of the object itself, right?  
But no, one would be wrong.  
You see, what you're forgetting is, chakra is an invasive alien energy that likes to intertwine itself to the very matter of anything it comes into contact with.   
How? I don't know. It's a mystical energy source; you figure it out!  
But the main takeaway here was, my water merging method resulted in the intended affect of my chakra getting a solid grip/lock on the log.   
This strategy turned out to be perfect for me as nearly any object I needed to swap with: e.g. A leaf, a log, paper or weeds contained some form of water.  
Then again, if I ever got stranded in a desert or surrounded by dry earth, there would be nothing for me to sense and merge with.   
But like, when was that ever going to happen?   
Besides, I lived in the Land of Fire, a country full of giant Hashirama trees, long winding rivers and large lakes. I was never going to run out of water filled objects while there.  
Step Three of the Substitution Jutsu involved pulling and pushing my targeted object in order to switch places with it.   
This step was the hardest of them all.   
(And that's saying something, believe me)  
At first, I attempted to just pull the log straight towards me and see what happened. To my utmost surprise, the log did not just phase through me and stop in the exact spot I pulled it from like it seemed to do in the anime.   
Instead, it came flying towards me at the speed of light and collided with my chest with a bruising "THUMP!"  
Next, I tried pushing myself away from the log, thinking that if pulling it towards me resulted in my body not moving. Then perhaps doing the opposite would result in the log not moving.  
This line of thinking... Turned out to be false.   
I know. *Insert sarcastic clap here*  
When I pushed my chakra away from the log, as my body was heavier, I just ended up propelling the poor hunk of wood across the room and into the wall.  
This pushing and pulling thing was pretty cool all in its own right. I dubbed it my, "Push & Pull" trick and proceeded to use it during my mundane chores like telekinesis. It made most task needlessly difficult, but I was determined to do it anyway.  
Why?  
Because telekinesis was AWESOME! That's why!  
The last thing I tried was combing a pull then push, one after the other.   
This time, it worked and I discovered that to complete the third step for the Substitution Jutsu, I had to pull the log towards me for one milli-second, twist my body around the log in a B-Twist in the next milli-second and push the log away from me in the last milli-second.  
I'm not sure if regular ninja did the intricate dance that I did when using the E-Rank Jutsu. But it worked for me and that's all that really mattered.   
Altogether, it took me a little under four months to execute a proper Substitution Jutsu and I spent the next year practicing it over and over and over again till it was seamless.  
Compared to that, learning the Teleportation Jutsu (or 'Shunshin' in Japanese) was easy... Well, easier.  
Firstly, the 'Teleportation' part of the Teleportation Jutsu was not actually teleportation as I knew from my first world. What ninja's meant when they said, "Teleportation" was that they moved their bodies REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, fast so that to the human eye, it looked like they were just teleporting from one place to another.  
How I ended up doing this was by concentrating my chakra into the balls of my feet and then expelling it as fast as I could, all at once. Resulting in a mini-rocket launch at the soles of my feet.  
AGAIN, I have no idea if this was how other ninja used the Teleportation Jutsu. But as Shigaraki's teaching method boiled down to: One demonstration, a not-so-helpful word of instruction, and a gruesome punishment if I failed...  
Well, I just figured that whatever I came up with was close enough.  
The first time I "teleported" I had come out of a three week stint of slowly releasing iddy biddy bits of chakra from my feet and getting frustrated when the amount I used didn't send me launching across the room.   
So, when I finally stumbled upon the correct amount, I flew across the hall, lightning quick, and broke my nose smacking into the stone wall like a dumbass  
One wave of Shiga's healing hand later and I was back to trying again!  
Turns out, the secret to launching oneself at high speeds is to start off by balancing on the balls of ones feet and leaning in the direction one intends to go.   
After I'd got that down, all I needed to was practice "teleporting" around at different speeds and directions.   
I am happy to say that I got to rebel against my tormentor just a tiny bit more by teleporting all around the base instead of walking.  
Regrettably though, I was banned from using the jutsu during my morning marathons.   
Anyway, after a much need thirty minute break for lunch, I had condensed training in the Dodging Room of Doom. Which just meant that the Level was adjusted to Intermediate and the speed of the projectiles increased to 100kmh.  
Modes 1.1, 2.1, and 3.1 were do-able.   
While I struggled to move my body quick enough in .2 and .3 settings unless I channelled my chakra into my limbs constantly.  
Frustratingly, all exercises in Modes 4 and 5 were next to impossible. Even with a chakra enhanced body, my eyes and instinct alone were not enough to tell where every projectile was coming from at those speeds.  
It took me a year and a half to figure out that I needed to employ my sensory field in order to calculate where was safe to dodge too. Basically, if there was an empty spot amongst the watery haze that was the water particles in the air, then it was a projectile.  
ONE hour of this led to ONE hour in the Target Hall, where I upgraded to throwing kunai, shuriken and senbon at MOVING targets.  
I know. What an upgrade, right?  
Anywho, after a much needed thirty minute break for Lunch, I had Taijutsu and "real" sparring back in The Stadium.  
As I had reached Genin level, all katas and ninja gymnastics were to be done on the walls, roof and water at least one hundred times each.   
And that was only the warm-up!  
During spars, the use of Genjutsu and Ninjutsu were now permitted and I was expected to incorporate any E-Rank jutsu I'd perfected into the spars.  
Often, this meant I got smacked down twice as fast, twice as hard in increasingly creative ways by The Villain because he'd decided to, quote, "Hold nothing back." against a seven/eight/nine-year-old girl...  
The sadist even liked to sneak in some killing intent and/or 'aim for the kill' whenever I got tired as extra motivation.  
(Although he never went through with the killing blow, he would just knock me out like a sissy!)  
To combat his more violent attacks, I took a page from Tsunade and Sakura's book and created my own version of their enhanced strength technique.  
Essentially, all I had to do was pool my chakra into my limbs while fighting and I miraculously gained the extra strength and speed needed to block the Jonin's hits. It was a shoddy knock-off of the original jutsu, admittedly. But my version made my limbs as light as a feather and solid as a rock, so I wasn't complaining.  
"What about the Genjutsu?" You ask.  
Well, let me tell you a little secret about Tsunade and Sakura's enhanced strength technique.  
You see, for one to cast a Genjutsu, one must push their chakra out of their body, insert it into their target's chakra system and project a new image, sensation, or whatever through their mind. This, when done well, resulted in a minute change in the targets charka flow and thus, could be detected in those with fine charka control.   
To dispel a Genjutsu, all one had to do was disrupt the flow of their own chakra using any kind of method they liked. You could force it to change directions, quickly push it out of your body and then pull it back in. Or, by suddenly halting its natural flow, exposing the invasive chakra when it kept moving and allowing you to push it out the nearest tenketsu gate.  
Method one was taught at the academy and required the hand sign of 'Tiger' to redirect the flow.   
Method two was taught to Chunin Genjutsu specialists and again, used the 'Tiger' hand sign to help safely direct the flow of expelled and reabsorbed chakra.  
Method three was only taught to Jonin in ANBU and ROOT members as it came with a high likely hood of death when done wrong.  
Naturally, as there was no hand sign required, this was the method Shigaraki taught a little seven-year-old me without hesitation.  
I quickly learnt that trying to 'halt the flow' of ones ENTIRE CHAKRA NETWORK was harder than trying to lick your elbow!!!Though, as this world had a bonnifide version of magic at everyone's disposal, one could do it IF (And that's a big if) they close ALL the Tenketsu Gates in their body SIMULTANEOUSLYS for one second.  
After that was achieved, all that was left to do was identify the still moving chakra and direct it to the nearest Tenketsu Gate.   
Once the doors were opened again, the invasive parasite was pushed out the waiting gate and the Genjutsu was obliterated.  
The technique worked 100% of the time.  
Whereas, depending on the strength of the Genjutsu, method one worked 67% of the time and method two worked about 89%.  
I understood that the majority would pick the easier options, but I couldn't figure out why anyone thought the third option was so dangerous???  
That was... Until I learnt that when one closes all the tenketsu points in a chakra system, you have four seconds before the rest of the body shuts down and dies.  
Insane, right?  
And that bastard thought it was a good idea to teach his seven year old daughter how to do this!?  
The guy was nuts.  
So, it was no surprise to anyone but him when I struggled to close all my chakra points At. The. Same. Time. On my first dozen tries.  
To his credit though, fourteen nights spent memorising and then practicing opening and controlling all my gates in the Isolation Cell did WONDERS!   
Five months after he taught me the technique, I expelled my first illusion... And promptly fainted.  
Yeaaah, I may have jumped the gun a bit there.   
I had mistakenly assumed that closing and then almost immediately reopening the gates simultaneously would be easy once I learnt how to coordinate a mass-exodus. But, closing three hundred and sixty-one nodes was like trying to milk a fish- It didn't wanna happen.  
It could be done.   
But it required immense self control, perfect focus, and the ability to ignore the feeling of having a heart attack.  
I didn't manage to perfect the method till my tenth year, sadly. In the mean time, I just had to ride out whatever high powered, vomit-inducing illusion was thrown at me.  
When I was close to chakra exhaustion, which happened at around hour number four, I had condensed chakra control exercises in the Snake Temple.  
I normally just spent a couple minutes mediating on the head of one of the five snakes and then practiced moving a DAMN PEBBLE all around my body without dropping it.   
The tricky part about this exercise was managing to move the pebble OVER ones clothes without dropping it like a hot potato.  
I could do it, but my body wouldn't stop buzzing for hours afterwards.  
Dinner started after I'd checked the local forest for game caught in my traps and foraged a few roots, nuts and fruits to stock up the Hideout's supplies.  
The first time I ventured outside since Hakuna's death, I went around checking all the old traps she'd set up previously. At finding the first one, I was confronted with the sight of a fluffy white bunny caught with it's neck snapped.  
It's lifeless red eyes stared up at me accusingly, and although it was a sight I had seen many times before, this time it struck a cord.  
I kneeled down over the cute bunny's corpse and slowly pried it free of the death trap. It lay motionless in my hands and I suddenly remembered how my mother's hand had felt they exact same way.  
The defensive wall I'd erected around my heart broke then...  
I sat in that forest and cried like I'd never cried before. The tears came thick and fast, snot poured out of my nose like a leaky faucet and my lungs puckered and gasped out uneven breaths for what felt like days.  
By the time I retuned back to the base, my eyes were swollen and blood shot, snot and tears had grown crusty across my face, neck and collar, and my head was pounding from a lack of fluids.  
After that, I couldn't stop myself from crying over every little thing!  
Cooking dinner- Crying  
The lack of Hakuna's soups, sauces, and spices- Sobbing   
The loss of her a yummy meals- Wailing.  
Because she was gone... And my meagre cooking skills could never compare... I would never eat her cooking again!!!  
When folding laundry, the difference between my folding style and hers had me ugly-crying hysterically over the freshly cleaned clothes.  
Because she always folded my underwear in cute little packages... And the way I folded my pants was all wrong... And my clothes would never be imbued with her Lavander scent again!!!  
While brushing my hair, making my bed, snuggling into the sheets, walking past her room, EVERY LITTLE THING she had once done, I now cried over like a new born baby desperate for food.  
It was I.N.S.A.N.E.  
It's really no wonder Shigaraki tried to force the water works out of my system via increased Torture Time, combined with a newly improved Study Lesson Curriculum to occupy my mind.  
Here, I relearnt NCEA Calculus, Statistics, Geometry and Trigonometry. Along with NCEA Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Advanced Clan Histories of The Leaf, Sand, Stone, Water, Lightning, Waterfalls, Grass and Rain Hidden Villages.   
Plus their kekkei genkai and/or hiden jutsu.  
If I started getting a little too competent, the sly Tanuki would switch in the Ninja skills of Forgery, Coding, Rote Memorization and Basic Sealing Theory.   
In his head, a good shinobi should know the names and abilities of EVERY villages' Kage, past and present, BY HEART.  
I'm sure that if their had still been jinchuriki, he would have made me memorise all the people who had been vessels for the Tailed Beasts as well.   
Thankfully, Naruto Uzumaki, as the Sage of Six Paths and Seventh Hokage, had abolished jinchuriki and set the chakra entities free.  
Luckily for me, the specific locations of Shukaku, Matatabi, Isobu, Son Goku, Kokuo, Saiken and Chomei were unknown.   
(Everybody knew Gyuki and Kurama had chosen to stay with their respective containers, Killer B and Naruto)  
If they were known, then I would probably have been forced to memorise that too. As it were, I only had to know which Lands they resided in generally and what abilities they had.  
All the while, Shigaraki stuck a tension seal on my forehead that artificially induced a migraine and slowly increased the intensity until I whited-out.   
This treatment was not worth the increased concentration and compartmentalizing skills I gained from it. Though, considering I was using the sessions as some much needed Cry-Therapy, no complaints left my lips.  
On the plus side; two weeks after my eighth birthday, my tear ducts FINALLY dried up and I moved onto the deep depression phase of my cycle of grief.  
I was emotionally exhausted by now and my whole world felt so grey and drab. Any spark of emotion was muted with an undertone of misery, sadness and loneliness.  
Though never hopelessness.  
I could see the light at the end of this long tunnel, after all.   
My escape would come when my father died giving me the Gozu Tenno Seal in two years time.   
All I had to do was survive till then (Please God, let me survive till then!!!)  
Meanwhile, my psychopathic father took my change in mind set as the perfect opportunity to start a new round of conditioning, introducing me to Missions Training.  
These 'missions' were held on the weekends and mostly took place in the nearby village of DaiDai   
(Don't question the name, that's just how it translates, OK?)  
It was a pretty secluded place, nestled in the mountains, and remained so thanks to the help of the literal demon, Soma sealed beneath the town's underground caves and shady Head of the Village, Kankitsu Akitsuki. The suspiciously Uzumaki-like man was engaged to DaiDai Village's main clan heiress, Remon Yoimura. The two were due to go through with their arranged marriage in five years time.  
There are a bunch of hijinks involved with the special wedding ceremony that doubled as a sealing ritual for Soma the Demon.  
But it all boils down to Soma escaping his magic rock and being sealed inside Remon instead, kinda like a jinchuriki.  
The poor girl looses her memories for her sacrifice and the town is saved, blah blah blah.  
The first time I ever laid eyes on the tiny community, I recognised it immediately and wondered if it was a coincidence that the one village close to the base juuuust happened to be one featured in an Boruto filler arc?  
I guess it didn't really matter because nothing that would happen in this town would contribute to the main plotline anyway. But it was still a surprise to discover it was out here, close to an ex-Orochimaru/ex-ROOT Hideout none the less.  
Naturally, our first order of business was to go shopping!  
Woohoo!!!  
The first me had hated shopping with a passion. The amount of clothing stores all packed into a mall overwhelmed my brain with too many options and I panicked. However, the second me had been living of ANBU's second-hand uniforms for years and was ready to wear any kind of clothing that WASN'T black for a change!  
As Shigaraki and I approached the main street wearing our shinobi gear under black hooded cloaks, he whispered, "Remember Sumire, the art of infiltration begins with the clothing. One can go anywhere and get away with anything when equipped with the right apparel."  
I nodded along, feeling a spark of excitement through my numb sadness in what felt like ages.   
"For this mission, and all other scouting missions held in civilian territory, it is imperative you blend in with the crowd. You. Do. Not. Want. to be remembered."  
"Yes sir," I replied, going with my standard response.  
The mad scientist's orders held sound logic and I agreed that blending into the background would be the easiest way to go unnoticed by shinobi in a crowd.   
But I had to keep in mind that sometimes NOT standing out in some way was suspicious in and of itself. The true key to infiltration missions in a shinobi ridden village was to adopt to all stereotypes of my perceived character, bar one to give the cover a sense of authenticity.  
After all, every human was unique in some way.  
To not be was a red flag if there ever was on!  
The key here was to be the kind of unique that was non-threatening and/or was a product of the times.   
E.g. A rebellious hairstyle or new fashion trend worth clothing.  
We entered the main square and my ears, eyes and nose were quickly assaulted by new sounds, sights and smells!  
The buildings were coloured deep browns, creamy whites and the occasional dark blue or red. The architecture reminded me funnily of Noddy Town. Most houses resembled oak cabins or 18th century British mansions. Even the wall protecting the village looked like it was pulled straight from Victorian England.  
Although, instead of cobbled streets and horse carriages, the roads were made of tightly packed earth and people walked everywhere on foot.   
It gave off the general vibe of a quaint rural village in the Canadian alps with ancient Japanese culture and clothing sprinkled in.  
"Come, Sumire," Shigaraki ordered, and I reluctantly followed him into a woman's clothing store situated opposite the town square's fountain.   
I'd expected the shop to be pretty basic judging by what was shown of shops in the anime. But surprisingly, it was eerily similar to any other modern clothing chain in my first life.   
There were rows and rows of dresses, skirts and tops hanging on coat hangers and the walls' shelves displayed every kind of high-heeled shoe imaginable.  
I let my eyes widen at the sight of so many bright pastel colours and grinned from ear to ear, adopting the persona of an excited eight-year-old civilian girl.  
"Wow!" I chimed, "Look, Daddy! Look! They have soooo many dresses!!!"  
A few middle aged ladies browsing the aisles smiled at me and I pretended to be oblivious to their open cooing.  
"Now remember, Ai-chan, we are only here to buy one dress for your birthday party," Shigaraki bent down and held up one finger like he needed to emphasize that "Ai-chan" was only allowed one dress for her upcoming birthday celebrations.  
Playing along, I let out a whiny, "Naaaaaaw," and received a few chuckles from the other mother's in the store. The scene we made was no doubt a common one in this store and thus, not to be questioned that the aforementioned father-daughter trio were wearing ominous black cloaks at all.  
"May I help you today, good sir?" A young woman from behind the counter called. She slipped away from the desk and approached us with a skip in her step.  
"Oh, thankyou! That would be wonderful," Shiga said, sounding as if he was in desperate need of rescuing.  
The blonde haired, orange eyed woman smiled before asking us what kind of clothes we were shopping for today.  
"I want a new dress for my birthday!" I proclaimed loudly and bounced on the balls of my feet like a hyper-active child would.  
"I see," the woman said, "Do you have a special colour or style in mind, Ai-chan?"  
I proceeded to bombard her with my childish babble while Shiga took the opportunity to slip away and buy some essentials. We ended up having me twirl around the changing rooms in a total of six floral kimono before I settled on a dark magenta singlet paired with a cream layered skirt and brown boots.  
The sneaky Tanuki also snagged a pale blue shirt dress, a sea green tee-shirt and grey shorts, along with a pale yellow half-length kimono-no obi- to wear over white leggings.  
By the end of the shopping trip I had the typical wardrobe of the average Boruto background character. Not even my royal purple hair and lack of black pupils would make me stick out now!  
"Bye-Bye!" I waved cheerfully at the assistant, bags in hand, and skipped out the doors next to my exhausted looking Dad.  
I felt rather accomplished with our little deception, to be honest. We had come up with my name, personality and cover story on the spot and complemented each others lies through-out, adding to the over arching narrative as it developed.   
All that was left to cement our image of a happy Father and Daughter duo spending a day in town was to get some lunch at a takeout and get eat sweets on our way home.  
Aaaaand that's what we did.  
Shiga lead me through the town in search of a food stall, making sure to cover all the alleyways and main roads while doing so. Until I'd formed a comprehensive 3D Map in my head.   
I babbled away about how annoying my friends at school were and how hard it had been to chose which classmates to invite to my party while we ate a pork bowl from a ramen stand. Then, I obnoxiously skipped towards the entrance gate, hungrily eating my mochi on a stick one by one.  
For the first time since I'd awakened in this world, I felt like a proper kid again, albeit a psuedo-japanese one.  
Yes, I was on a mission and yes, everything I had done that day helped me gather intel on the village. But it felt so freeing to act my own age for once in this life. I'd genuinely forgotten what it was like to be a kid.  
Shigaraki let us meander out of view of the village's outer houses before he passed back my cloak and we took of into the trees.  
We spent the next two hours going over every little bit of information I'd gathered from our journey and got subjected to the Hell Viewing Genjutsu for twenty minutes when I failed to spot all the things the Jonin had spotted.  
It was both a freeing and confronting experience, looking back.  
But I'm getting of track!  
My next mission into DaiDai Village was done alone.   
Shishi gave me an empty information file, along with a single picture of a black haired, blue eyed man and was told to gather all the intel needed to fill out the file in two days using any technique I deemed necessary.  
That mission had been relatively easy compared to the next one, where I was ordered to steal a valuable ceramic vase from the man and to sell it back into the black market.  
The intel gathering and thievery parts were way too easy with my Transformation Jutsu and Shunshin. The hard part came when I had to sell the publicly recognisable item through the black market in the SAME TOWN!!  
Not only did that increase the risk my item would be identified as the now stolen object, but the likelihood of the transaction being traced back to me increased ten fold!!!  
That was the challenge of working in a village where everybody knew everybody and their dog. (The bunch of nosy neighbours!)  
Anyway, I managed to successfully complete the mission by smashing the painted ceramic vase into iddy biddy bits and repurposing the pieces into three mosaic mirrors. I baked each one in the oven to give them an aged look and sold them as rare, imported art from the Land of Earth.  
Never before was I so grateful for being dragged along to my little sisters Arts&Crafts classes then I was during that mission.  
I also counted my lucky stars that the first me had watched so many hustle and heist films. Without them, I wouldn't have known to use a fake name and cash-only during interactions with shady clients.  
My final mission as an eight-year-old was to eliminate- a.k.a. MURDER- the same man I'd spied and robbed over the last couple of months.  
I should have seen it coming, and yet again, I didn't.  
My head knew that all my missions had been leading up to this and I'd accepted logically that being a ninja meant becoming a contract killer.  
On the other hand, my heart was still guilt ridden over my siblings and mother's deaths and I was outraged that I was expected to taint my soul with even more blood!!  
But again, there wasn't anything I could realistically do...  
What Shigaraki wanted, Shigaraki got.  
If his daughter refused him, I knew I wasn't strong enough to stop him from slapping my wrists with chakra suppressant seals, placing me under a Genjutsu and forcing my hand regardless.  
"Besides," I rationalized, "I've already committed fratricide, what is a little homicide matter in the grand scheme of things?"  
My second chance at life was already dripping with spilt blood, surely a little more couldn't hurt me further, right???  
At the end of the day, the man's death would be nothing more than a single drop in the sea... People died every hour of every day, I was only helping him along a bit... Right?  
With that oh-so-healthy mindset, I set of in full ANBU gear in the dead of night, borrowed a plain white rabbit mask from the base's stores, snuck into the man's lodge like a shadow and stabbed my kunai directly through his skull while he slept.  
He died instantly.  
It was a little disconcerting to know that my strength allowed me to slice a kunai through the human body like butter, even without my enhanced strength technique. It had taken little to no effort to stab straight through the man's skull, pierce his brain and then have the tip poke out the other side of his skull.  
I mean, I knew intellectually that I was strong. But to see just how strong the second me really was threw me for a loop...  
The other thing that bothered me was just how anti-climatic the whole thing was. A part of me had been expecting to fight the man to the death in a vicious battle not unlike the one I had with Shigaraki all the time.  
But the man hadn't even registered my presence.  
My kunai had whistled through the air, sliced through his brain and his entire body had simply stilled. There was no sudden gasp, no frantic twitch, no wide open eyes filled with fear or a mouth hanging open on the verge of a scream... Just one minute his chest was rising in falling and the next it was not.  
It was as simple as that.  
For a second afterwards, I wondered why a pang of guilt hadn't hit me yet? 'Perhaps I'm in shock,' I reasoned, 'Perhaps my mind hasn't registered his death yet...'  
You don't need to know much about the man I eliminated. Though it's important to remember that his name was Daisuke Fukushima, dubbed, "The Scholar" by me, for future reference.  
He was a Feudal Lord with investments in the main competitor of Konoha's Scientific Ninja Technology and Research Department's sponsor, The Kaminiarimon Company.  
Essentially, he financially supported the rival company of the Scientific Ninja Tech's main funder and was thus, a threat to the Departments continued funding.  
There had been a bounty on his head and Shigaraki had taken it upon himself to collect it. To him, low bounties were the perfect way to break me in and give his young daughter some experience.  
I'm ashamed to admit that it took me two restful nights before the guilt reared up through my walls of apathy. When it did, I suddenly realised that I had granted a man a quick and painless death just because my father had said so.  
...I was beginning to think like OG Sumire!!!  
I WAS BECOMING OG SUMIRE AND IT HAD TAKEN A STRANGER'S DEATH FOR ME TO NOTICE IT!!!  
The epiphany had barely registered in my mind before my stomach flipped and I threw-up all over myself. Feeling ill, I had just enough time to strip my bed and pyjamas and have then burned, switched out with clean ones, and redressed before my alarm clock sounded the start of a new day.  
I ran through my usual Monday routine and stood through a dull but thorough report to The Villain about my mission's success.  
His congratulatory smile and twinkle of satisfaction in his obsidian orbs sickened me to my core.   
Then and there I made a vow to myself.  
Going forward, I was to kill whoever I needed to kill, as long as this man's brainwashing didn't control me. As soon as it became clear I was no longer living life on my own terms, I would quit being a ninja and go into an early retirement, PRONTO!  
You might think this is immoral of me.  
And in the context of my first world, you would be right.  
But this wasn't my old world.   
It was the Narutoverse.  
A place where millions of children trained to become magical soldiers to spy, steal and kill for their countries in their tweens.  
I knew there was no way to survive the approaching threat of the Otsutsuki Clan and the Kara Organization without being dangerous and powerful.  
If that meant I had to adapt to my new world and become a proficient killer of superpowered ninja, then so be it.  
But I would be doing so under my own power and rules!!!  
BELIEVE IT!  
"..."  
Okay, maaaaaaybe that last line was a little cheesy, but the rest still stands! My purpose, actions, and dreams in my second life would be All. My. Own.  
Not Tanuki Shigaraki's, Not Naruto Uzumaki's, NO ONES!  
This was MY SECND LIFE and NOBODY was going to run it for me!!!  
After my vow was sworn, I let my inner cultivated killer run free and abandoned my previous morals to suit my needs going forwards.   
-Murder was still bad and it sucked and I hated it. But if I had to do it, then I would do so efficiently and I wouldn't beat myself up over not feeling guilty when doing so.  
-Spying, thievery and general trickery were all okay, as long as I took personal responsibility for my actions afterwards.  
And,  
-Emotional honesty with myself was a must.  
Not the strict Christian Morals I'd been born and raised in, true.  
But it was the closest I was going to get if I wanted to survive true to myself in the shinobi world.  
CONTINUING ON!  
Missions after that either took place in DaiDai Village or its neighbour, Hacho Village. The latter was three times the size of DaiDai and was built around a giant lake that had once been a large crater.   
Was this caused by a meteor, a ninja god's jutsu, or a Tailed Beast?  
Nobody in the village knew.  
But I had a sneaking suspicion it had been created during Hagaromo and Hamura Otsutsuki's battle with Kaguya Otsutsuki a thousand years ago.  
The village itself was about a two day run from the hideout and relied mainly on the fishing trade the lake provided. The architecture had nothing remotely Japanese about it. The buildings could have been pulled straight from a German Suburb for all its similarities in architecture. Their was an outdoor market, concrete streets, and large public facilities like the town hall. Even their police uniforms were modelled off the British royal guard, coloured a sapphire blue instead of rose red.  
Honestly, it felt very out-of-place for the Land of Fire.   
For a moment I could almost pretend I was back in my first world!  
Until I saw the people dressed in kimonos, yukata, and haori, that is. Plus, the police used swords instead of guns and the people spoke Japanese, not German or English.  
(But if I ignored that, my fantasy could continue)  
At the end of each day, after Torture Time/Study Time concluded, I spent forty minutes in the Sick Bay.   
Shigaraki liked to keep me healthy and well, so took extra care in healing my injuries like a surgeon and extracting his precious data through the same series of physicals and bloods I'd been doing since I was two.  
I appreciated the effort, honestly I did!  
But I just wished he would stop sticking a needle into the crook of my arm and filling my blood stream with that shimmery white acid of a booster shot Every. Single. Day.  
It hurt and it burned and my body always felt fatigued and foggy afterwards and I HATED IT!!!  
Surely, he could just dispense of the pretence of it being a "Booster Shot" filled with vitamins and anti-bodies already?  
We both knew it wasn't anything like that. So was he still insisting I get the jab and not expect me to inquire into its true purpose???  
The dude was plain delusional.  
My first mission as a nine-year-old was to locate one, Emina or "round orbs" as I called her. She was a civilian traveller from Stone Country who often wandered the main trading paths selling herbs and spices. It was an old fashioned way of trading and one not used often in these modern times.   
But regardless, Round Orbs had a bounty on her head for being the drug mule of an irrelevant gang and thus, I was sent to eliminate her.   
The mission only took me four days, which I spent tracking her down near Noodle Country's boarder, approaching the caravan as a brunette-black eyed orphan girl and accidentally spilling my drink onto her sleeve. The "drink" was of course a slow acting poison that took thirty six hours to kill its target. Giving me plenty of time fallow their troupe in the trees for a day or two until I confirmed Round Orbs untimely passing.  
I felt horrible straight away this time. Not because the woman's still body disturbed me. But because the heart wrenching sobs of a man who had to have been her husband and the neck-jerk tears from her long time friends highlighted to me just how devastating my actions were.  
Round Orb's was no longer suffering, but her friends and family most certainly were. I couldn't stop reminding myself that I had done this too them and no excuse could ever make up for that loss... But again, what was I meant to do?   
I had chosen to take the stranger's life so mine could continue.   
Was it wrong? Yes!  
Was her death necessary? No!  
Yet I had done it anyway because that was my mission.   
All I could do for my victim now was to take responsibility for my actions, never forget nor deny I was the one who brought about her death and move forward.   
My next four missions were all assassination orientated, much to my chagrin. It seemed Shiga was determined to rote out my "squeamish constitution" and "delicate sensitivities". He planned to desensitize me to death by the end of the year and I'm not proud to admit that his plan worked.  
During my ninth year, my eliminated targets went as so:  
Daisuke Fukushima or "The Scholar"- A Feudal Lord  
Emina or "Round Orbs"- A Traveller from the Land of Stone.  
Isarabi or "Fish Girl"- An human test subject gone wrong.  
Eito Yoimura or "Old Geezer"- A Yoimura clan elder in retirement.  
Hibiki Tsuki or "Royal Brattiness"- A Prince of the Land of Moon.  
Lando or "Harry Potter"- A Tonika Village survivor gone rogue.  
Along the way, it became too hard to refer to my targets using their real names, as that reminded me they were actual people with lives and families I was killing. So, I chose to give them titles based on a facet of their appearance or personality instead.  
Numbering them had felt too impersonal and I reckoned they deserved to be recognised as more than a vague statistic to me.  
Thus, my nick-naming fetish was born!  
As to what my own internal reasoning for their deaths went... Well, Old Geezer supported Remon's abusive fiancé, Royal Bratiness wasn't suited to be Moon Country's next King, The Harry Potter look-alike wanted to rebuild the cursed Tonika Village, and Fish Girl was upsetting the sea life food chain hierarchy in Wave.  
Not the best of reasons to murder, true.  
But it was better than nothing and it helped me sleep at night.  
The actual killing got easier each time. None of them had shinobi training and were mostly unguarded and unaware their life was in danger. The only one I had struggled getting close too was the Moon Prince on Moon island.  
I'd had to travel all to the edge of Tea Country to catch a boat inorder to cross the small channel to reach the place. The Moon Palace was highly guarded and I'd had to spend a week cataloguing their patrol patterns. My initial plan had been to sneak in as a one of the guards to get into the main living quarters then knock-out a maid, steal her appearance and sneak into the Prince's room while he slept.  
Unfortunately, that plan had to be scrapped when I discovered someone clever bloke had come up with the idea to tag each loyal servant with a special identifying chakra seal on their left shoulders!  
That meant the chance I would trigger the alarm had sky-rocketed and I had to figure out another way. Thankfully, I'd seen enough spy films in my life that when infiltration didn't work, there was always the option to parachute in from above!   
I didn't have a parachute, as aeroplanes weren't a thing here, so I improvised by "teleporting" myself into the air as high as I could and then body-switching with droplets of water in the night air to land on the roof. Three flawless kawarimi's latter and I was slipping through Royal Brattiness's room. I granted the guy a swift and painless death with my senbon then left the way I came. I felt particularly stupid for not having thought of that method sooner and beat myself up over all the time I'd wasted the whole journey back.  
Not once during the entire time I was free to roam the lands for my missions did I think about escaping Shigaraki.   
I could have, it would have been as simple as never returning. But an invisible tether kept pulling me back time and time again...  
At the time, I rationalized that the only reason I was going back was to get the Gozu Tenno, nothing more, nothing less.  
Yet now I wonder, 'Was that really my only reason?'  
To this day, I'm not quite sure...  
Regarding my other missions, when I wasn't busy cutting throats and poisoning tea, Shigaraki had me flooding DaiDai's black market with hallucinogens manufactured at the base or robbing a series of public banks along the Land of Fire's southern coastline.  
Turns out, I had a very innocent and trusty worthy look to my face that could fool the most hard of hearts. Truly, Sumire's beautiful features did wonders when it came to making up for my lack of social skills and proper etiquette.  
Most people just saw a purple haired maiden and missed the fact I had was radiating dastardly intentions from ever pore!?  
It blew my mind.  
ANYWAY!  
By the time my tenth birthday rolled around for the second time, I had graduated to Level: Intermediate (100kph) in the Dodging Room of Doom, could throw 16 kunai simultaneously and have them hit their moving targets, run 100km in 1hr, produce a perfectly spherical sensory field forty-five metres in diameter, perform ten Substitution Jutsu in a row, use my strongest Shunshin five times consecutively, could safely expel a Genjutsu using Method 3, AND I could cast a decent enough Transformation Jutsu to fool my Jonin level Father.  
Although, to be honest, the low-level Genjutsu technique was NOT my strong suit. Having to layer my chakra over the outside of my body like a full body-suit and then project a realistic imagine onto said suit using will alone?!   
While ALSO forming the hand seals: Dog-Boar-Ram?!!  
It simply way too mentally taxing to keep up for longer than fifteen minutes.  
Taijutsu wise, I was edging close to Chunin level and relied mainly on short length shunshin, chakra enhanced strength/durability and my water sensory field to hold my own against Shiga's superior skills.  
I was no where near to beating a Jonin yet, but low-level Chunin or high level Genin, I could probably take.  
I also passed my Forging, History and Sealing Theory exams with excellence. While my Maths, Science, Coding and rote memorization tests were average at best, barely passing at worst. Look, my old brain and new brain just weren't wired that way!  
Blame it on the Dyslexia and Dyscalculia, alright?  
Tanuki Shigaraki; my one and only father/slave driver, celebrated this immense mile stone (my results, not my fetish, btw) by inviting me into his secret lab and introducing his daughter to the Gozu Tenno Seal.   
He placed my ten-year-old Sumire self infront of eight giant silver tanks connected in a web to hulking big machines and announced, "This is my life's work, Sumire! Once I transfer the seal to you, our glorious Leader will be avenged!!!"   
With a crazed look in his eyes, he had dug his fingers into my shoulders and pressed our foreheads together.   
"You will get our revenge on The Leaf, won't you Sumire? Promise me you will avenge Danzo Shimura's death! PROMISE ME YOU WILL POUND THAT VILAGE TO DUST!!!" He screamed.  
It took all my self control to nod along when I intended to do anything but.   
"Yes, yes, that's my good girl, Sumire," he had cooed, stroking my royal purple bangs out of my eyes, "Under your control, the Nue will be Konoha's end. It is preordained by the Mother of Chakra herself!"  
And that was how my final year with my father began.  
With a declaration of war on the Hidden Leaf Village.


End file.
